


moon landing

by elliebell (Naladot)



Category: GOT7, Miss A
Genre: Angst and Romance, Canon Universe, F/M, Feelings, Getting Together, Past Relationship(s), Slow Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:18:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22063993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Naladot/pseuds/elliebell
Summary: Suzy and Jinyoung get cast in the same film project, which forces them to confront all the things they never said.
Relationships: Bae Suji | Suzy/Park Jinyoung (GOT7)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 24
Collections: #teamprocrastinators' holiday fic exchange 2019





	moon landing

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yoonbot (iverins)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/gifts).

> For Sapphy, my dear friend, I hope you like this fic!
> 
> For my #teamprocrastinators friends, thank you for being such a wonderful source of fun and support this year. Yun, Shida, Hannah, Sapphy: you all are a lovely presence in my online life and I am glad to call you my friends!

* * *

Suzy was looking forward to her upcoming film project until the moment when, standing in a hotel bathroom in Paris, the movie producer’s voice crackles over the speaker phone and informs her that her co-star has been recast.

“Recast?” Suzy repeats, careful to measure the tone of her voice. She doesn’t want to appear unhappy, even if she is. “Who did you cast?”

“Park Jinyoung,” says the producer. “The one from Got7. Your former label mate, correct?”

He says it so briskly, off-handedly, unaware that the earth has now tilted underneath Suzy’s feet. She grips the edge of the countertop with one hand and tries to finish her lipstick with the other, but her hand shakes, drawing over the top of the lip.

“Yes,” she says, without her voice wavering.

“That will simplify things, then,” the producer continues. “Since you’re already familiar.”

“Yes,” Suzy agrees. She scrapes the excess lipstick off with her fingernail and looks at herself in the mirror. In the bathroom lighting she looks ashen and exhausted, but she can still recognize the angles of her face that have given her this career. “Yes, we are familiar.”

Unfortunately, that doesn’t simplify anything.

  
  
  


In general, if Suzy is unhappy about something, she keeps silent. Most people resent a beautiful woman’s unhappiness. Once, her ex-boyfriend asked, “You have everything you can possibly want, and I’m still not good enough?” Once, her ex-bandmate asked, “How can you be so greedy as to think you don’t have enough when you’ve gotten everything?” And they were all correct. She hates herself for it.

So she has learned to stuff her unhappiness into a small box, which she swallows and holds inside of her body, out of sight from the rest of the world while she pastes on a smile. This is the smile she uses when she walks into the first table reading (in jeans and a T-shirt, but someone will likely say snidely later that she dressed for attention, and she knows, and she can’t change what they think, but it still stings).

Jinyoung is already in the room. He bows along with everyone else when she enters, and Suzy finds her eyes darting to meet his. Her stomach turns over when their eyes meet, threatening to upend the box of sorrows she never lets anyone see. But just as soon as their eyes meet, he averts his gaze to her manager, and bows again. Of course.

Suzy takes a seat at the far end of the table, but she’s not at all surprised to hear her name immediately afterward. “Bae Suzy!” calls the producer, whom she doesn’t even dislike but is cast from the same mold as every other executive she’s ever met. She’s used to being treated like a doll; the question is just how much control they want over her. “Come sit next to Park Jinyoung.”

She obediently gathers her things and goes over to where Jinyoung is sitting. She flashes him a fake smile, but his eyes are still on something else, just to the right of her head. So it will be like this. She sits down.

“Good to see you,” she says in a whisper, taking a second to glance at him again. She wonders how much of the script he’s read yet. They play a young married couple, preparing to join a new settlement on the moon, and they will kiss in several scenes. “It’s been a while.”

A long pause stretches between them. Suzy can hear her own heart beating in her ears. After an eternity, his eyes flick up to hers, and he turns just slightly in his chair.

“A long time,” he agrees, and gives her a smile she thinks is fake. When he turned, his knee came so close to hers that she can feel the heat radiating off of him, but they are not touching. Her heart pounds a bit harder.

The director announces the beginning of the table read. She turns and opens her script, keeping her knee just close enough to his that he will feel it, too.

  
  
  


The most hilarious twist of Suzy’s life is that, as many times as she’s been dubbed “the nation’s first love,” she is no one’s. Every boy she ever dated loved someone else first, and more than her.

But Jinyoung is her first love. In 2009 they were both trainees and every day they would walk from the company building after dance lessons to a nearby convenience store, where they’d buy a plate of tteokbokki to share between them. “You’re really special, Suji,” he’d said once, on a rainy afternoon, the low light of a gray sky reflected in his eyes. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone else like you.”

And no matter what, no matter how many people tell her they love her, no matter how many people idolize her or adore her, she’s still got his words lodged like a splinter under her skin. Because right after debut she confessed her feelings to him, and he said, “You don’t have time for me anymore, Suzy,” like he’d analyzed the data and reached an impartial judgment. She was cast in  _ Dream High _ before she could prove him wrong.

Years later, she asked him (after practice for a JYP Nation concert, though they couldn’t just walk to a convenience store, not anymore) if he remembered. “I cried over you,” she said, pretending to joke and laugh. She was so good at pretending that sometimes she didn’t even realize she was lying.

“I cried over you, too,” he joked in return. She couldn’t tell if he was lying or not.

The hallway was empty and the voices of other staff and celebrities echoed down from another room, where they were all enjoying dinner. They were alone. Impulsively, Suzy stepped forward, putting her hand on his arm. She let her facade fall, and leaned forward.

“Suzy,” he said before she could kiss him.

She looked up. His eyes were closed, and he opened them slowly, staring down at her beneath his eyelashes that must have charmed thousands.

She came back to herself. They were both in relationships with other people, now. Whatever she felt was just a mist of the past, hanging around her and clouding her view.

“I’m sorry,” she said quickly, and rushed down the hall, desperate to get away.

  
  
  


The film will be shot in a rural area that looks rather like the moon—an intentional artistic mirroring, of course. Suzy goes out to the shoot location with her manager the day before filming and takes a step away from the temporary set and surrounding camp that’s been set up. Wide plains surround them, the grass rippling softly, gray and barren. The sky is a pale dome overhead.

“Suzy,” says her manager. She turns on her heels, and spots Jinyoung over his shoulder.

He’s standing next to the director in a crisp coat, undoubtedly talking through the story and his character’s motivations. Why  _ does _ he want to go to the moon? Suzy never asked, because she already knew the truth of the story lies in the desperate need to believe in the possibility of something other than what you’ve got. She still does. Believe, that is. It’s her worst trait.

  
  
  


Hours later, the sun has set and she pulls a bottle of wine out of her suitcase, walks down the hall, and knocks on Jinyoung’s door. It takes an eternity for him to answer it.

“Hey,” he says, visibly surprised. His designer coat has been abandoned in favor of a threadbare Got7 concert T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and his hair is wet and frizzy. “What’s wrong?”

She blinks. “Nothing’s wrong,” she says. Then she pauses, because that’s hardly true. Everything is wrong, between the two of them. She holds out the wine. “I wanted to give you this. To wish you good luck for the shoot.”

His brow furrows. He shifts to hold the door open with his shoulder and takes the bottle from her, holding it gingerly, as though she’s brought him some alien object. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“I did.”

He looks up at her. The box in her chest rattles and thrums.

“Well,” she says, and takes a step back. “I should—”

“Do you want to come in?”

  
  
  


It’s awkward.

Their rhythm is all off, so much so that Suzy wonders if she’d imagined the boy who used to be her closest friend.

Jinyoung converses well, of course. Charisma has always been one of his best traits. He talks about how happy he is for this opportunity, and how excited his bandmates were for him (“Bambam said to tell you hello,” he says. “Of course,” Suzy laughs.) and how nervous he is to get started.

He pours her a glass of wine and sits down on the couch next to her. “I knew you were in the film,” he says, and hesitates. She can feel his eyes on her. “But I didn’t know what role.”

She chews at her bottom lip and stares into the bloody depths of the wine. There’s so much space between them right now, she feels cold. A memory flashes to mind of the two of them, sweaty and disgusting, sitting with their backs up against the wall of the practice room and laughing at a joke she can’t remember anymore.

“Are you disappointed?” she asks in a small voice.

“Of course not,” he says quickly. Then he hesitates again, reminding her that this Jinyoung is all grown up. Measured, careful. “Are you?”

“No,” she says. She takes a sip of the wine. “You’ll do a great job.”

  
  
  


The next day, they begin filming one of the last scenes of the movie. Everything on movie sets happens out of order, which feels normal to Suzy now. In the scene, it's the morning before their characters join the expedition to start a settlement on the moon, and it features the two of them in bed in her character’s mother’s house, way out on an isolated rice farm. Everything in the script feels lonely and desolate to Suzy, the same as the melancholy sky and rippling fields, and the same as she feels when she lies down next to Jinyoung on the low bed frame with fifty people watching them and a boom mic floating overhead.

He has a short speech at the beginning of the scene where he waxes eloquent about the future of humanity. Suzy’s brain drifts to more mundane things: him and her and what kind of idiot she must be to still have feelings for him, after all this time.

A long pause draws her out of her reverie. She realizes suddenly that he’s repeating his last line.

“But maybe we should stay,” he says. “Who knows what will happen to us if we go?”

Her mind blanks. She has a line, but she has no idea what it is. She stares up at the ceiling, flat dark boards, and grasps for the words. Jinyoung’s hand is right next to hers, their fingers touching. Heat radiates off of him.

“But if we don’t go,” she says finally, “we’ll never know what we missed out on.” 

It’s not the line, but no one calls cut.

“We could die,” Jinyoung says. She’s surprised, momentarily, that he’s rolling with her improvisation. She imagines the two of them shooting off to space in a rocket toward untold dangers. And adventure.

“We’ll die here, regardless,” she says. “I’d rather take the risk.”

His hand brushes against hers under the covers of the bed. Her stomach turns over, and she can feel his gaze on her skin.

“Cut!” yells the director. “That was good, but let’s try it as written for this next take, okay?”

“Okay,” Suzy calls. She sits up in the bed, suddenly cold. The crew moves to reset.

“Your line is, ‘I’ll go as long as you’re with me,’” Jinyoung says. “I think your line was better, though.”

She looks over at him. For a moment they stare at each other, quiet.

“I just got distracted,” she says, feeling oddly bare and exposed.

  
  
  


In general, people are not interested in her opinion.

They are interested in her face, in her body, in her attention, in her investment, in her potential. But seldom her opinion. This is true even among those who should know better, who would never do the same to another woman. Her face makes her an exception. But she cannot say this out loud, or express her frustration, because no one wants to hear it. They resent her for it.

Sometimes she thinks about those late evenings as a trainee, walking to the bus at sunset. There weren’t so many trainees when she started, and most of them were older than her, preparing for the Chinese girl group that never happened. She talked with Hyerim, and Jaebum, but Jinyoung was her best friend, the one she really understood and who understood her in return. Her skyrocket to fame created a canyon between her and all the rest of them, even the ones who did debut, and after a while, even the ones she started with didn’t think to ask her any questions about what she thought, or how she felt.

Sometimes she wishes she’d never become famous.

  
  
  


She’s back in her hotel room that evening when a knock sounds on her door. She’s actually surprised when she opens it and finds Jinyoung on the other side instead of her manager.

He holds up a plastic bag. “Did you eat yet?”

“I’m on a diet.”

“Aren’t we all?”

She laughs, and steps back to let him in. He wanders in too stiffly, standing very upright like he has someone to impress. She laughs again, and takes the food out of his hands.

“Do you want to sit down?” she asks, gesturing to the couch, a twin to the one in Jinyoung’s room. But he’s frowning at the floor, hands in his pockets. After a long pause, he looks up.

“Do you hate me?”

She sets down the chopsticks she just pulled out of the bag and looks up, heart in her throat. 

“I don’t hate you.”

“I just feel like there’s this huge gap between us,” he says. “And I don’t—really know why. I mean, I know, but I don’t know. You know?”

It’s the least articulate she’s heard Jinyoung sound since they were sixteen, and she has to suppress a reflexive laugh. “Jinyoung,” she says carefully. “You rejected me.”

“Years ago,” he says. “Are you really telling me it’s about that?”

She stands up, pressing her palms together in front of her, trying to make herself compact. A habit she picked up over the years. “It hurt.”

“Suzy—”

Something inside her chest rattles, and without warning, the box of all her feelings starts to spill over.

“Jinyoung,” she says, her volume rising, “I told you how I felt, and you rejected me, and  _ yes _ , it still hurts! Just because it was a long time ago—does it matter? I’d never felt that way about anyone before. Or since.”

He looks stunned and stands in front of her, silent. 

It’s true, though. It’s all true.

“And don’t say that I’m just upset because you’re the only one who ever rejected me.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” he says hoarsely.

“Because that's not true. Or fair.” She sighs, wrapping her arms around herself. “But it’s what everyone would be thinking. And I don’t want to hear it.”

Another silence stretches across the space between them. He looks lost, and just as beautiful as she remembers him. Older, now, and more polished. But the softness in his eyes is the same.

“Suzy,” he says finally, taking a step toward her, and then stopping. “We were teenagers, and we had a dating ban, and I was—I was scared. What would happen if you and I were together? We'd just get hurt.”

She gives a light laugh. “It was like wanting to go to the moon.”

“Yeah,” he says. “And I wasn’t ready to take that risk. But I didn’t know I hurt you. Not like this.”

"Well," she says. "You did. I _loved_ you. I wanted to be with you and I'd never felt anything so terrible as knowing you didn't feel the same way."

"That's not true," he says. "I felt the same way. But I was scared."

She falls silent, lost in the past. Maybe he only thinks he felt the same way, now that he's older, and thinking about what he missed out on. Maybe she only thinks she loved him because of how she's ruminated on it all these years, comparing what might have happened between them to every real relationship she has.

"And that time, when you—well, I thought you were going to kiss me," he continues. "I didn't know what was happening. I thought you were making fun of me."

Of course. Everyone, even Jinyoung, just saw themselves reflected in the mirror of her fame. They never thought to look past it, and see the girl living inside of it. She closes her eyes, thinking back to all the times people were surprised by the depth of her feelings. Sometimes she hates being herself, hates the things she can’t change, hates that she’s still in this rocket ship hurtling toward the stars.

“I’m sorry,” Jinyoung says.

She opens her eyes.

  
  
  


They go up to the roof to watch the sunset. The sky is a deep shade of red, streaked with gold. The scent of an impending thunderstorm hangs in the air.

“Do you remember that time we went out for snacks between language lessons and dance practice?” Jinyoung asks.

“Yes,” Suzy laughs. “And it started raining, and—”

“We were in so much trouble.” He laughs, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “I had more fun before you debuted.”

“Because you had less pressure,” Suzy teases.

“Because of you.” He nudges her with his elbow.

What would have happened if they’d started dating back then? He was right, almost certainly, that they would have crashed and burned in a spectacular way. It would have hurt, badly. But it would have been worth it, she thinks.

“I think we have a lot of catching up to do,” Jinyoung says. “I want to know what I missed.”

“Me too.” She turns to face him. There’s so much she doesn’t know, and so much he doesn’t know, but the opportunity shivers in the air. Maybe this time, they’re prepared for the risk.

She leans forward and angles her mouth up to meet his. Their lips press together gently, feather light. His hand comes up to rest against her cheek, and then she leans in, pushing deeper into the kiss and sliding her arms around his neck.

“You have a lot of time to make up to me,” she says, putting just enough space between their lips to tell him what she thinks. What she wants.

She feels him smile as he starts to kiss her again.

“We've got time," he says.

_ end. _


End file.
